


Death of a Marriage

by dandeliononfire



Category: Original Work
Genre: And the pain it takes to get there, Divorce, F/M, It is about walking away, this isn't a happy one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:10:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23482885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dandeliononfire/pseuds/dandeliononfire
Summary: It's a fictional short about the night a marriage dies I wrote four years ago.When I came out publicly as gay/pan, someone close threw at me that they thought I was only "thinking" I was "that way" because I "hate men." I don't, as a matter of fact. I'm actually a pretty strong ally to men, especially when I see a lot of really good guys getting cut down in the flood of 'rage against the patriarchy' that is becoming so prevalent. But, I would also be BLIND to see that there aren't HUGE problems in our culture with inequalities, double-standards, injustices, and assaults of many types. And it would be a violent attack on my character to assume I haven't, as a woman, as a daughter, as a female who practiced law for over a decade, actually experienced first hand *many* of them.And so this story is a combination. In part it draws personal threads from a particular man, whose real history I know and pity and know contributed to his own trauma, but sadly ultimately grew into something cancerous. While it is also a fictionalized commentary on a, though not universal, still-present disregard of wives in today's culture. But, truthfully, the parties could be any gender, because it's about relationship.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	Death of a Marriage

It’s not their worst fight.

They’ve had plenty of arguments before. Even screaming matches. They’ve been more common in these last two years of marriage than in their first eight combined, but usually, their fights are only sparked by irritation. And not even always irritation with each other, but just with the wear of the day.

Tonight’s fight starts in the kitchen, which is normal for them. Because that’s where the day ends, with the cleaning away of the last dirty dish and putting the day’s soiled clothes into the wash. And the fight is about nothing significant. It could be about anything, really, or about nothing. It only happens that tonight it’s about whether their truck needs an oil change.

And even though it isn’t the worst fight, it’s the death of them.

Because this time, he carries the chip of pride on his shoulders well beyond the sunset. This time, he lets it get away from him. He lets it take form and shape itself until it’s a creature that squares his shoulders for him and pulls his back so straight that the vertebrae grind against one another. This time, when she’s brushed her teeth and removed her makeup and she tells him she is going to bed, he doesn’t even mumble a weak ‘good night.’ He just stares at the television.

It’s a small thing. But a big thing too.

And this time, he doesn’t come to bed and lay next to her.

That’s a different thing.

This time, he sneaks into their room only once he’s sure he’s out-waited her, well after she tiredly turns off the light. He comes to rob them, like a thief to his own bed.

Stealing a pillow.

There’s a throw blanket on the couch, so he doesn’t bother to steal one of those.

He thinks she’s asleep, but she’s not. She’s wide awake and hears the unsettling growl he makes. It’s a response in the fight he’s still having with her in the fires of his imagination. The resentful rumble doesn’t have words, but it’s enough to tell her he’s gone someplace farther away than before.

“Come to bed,” she says, just as he turns to walk out of the room. He’s never not come to bed in the end. Not once.

He stops. Even turns around.

He silently spears a dozen hostile barbs at her, thoughts that he pets and treasures. He tells himself that if he says them only in his mind then they aren’t really poison, that they don’t have to be taken back once he admits tomorrow he doesn’t really mean them.

But they’re in the air, pickling it, and she can sense them.

“Please,” she says, neither pleading nor weak. Not yet. For now, she just tries to be calm and not set him moving further away. Struggles hard to not sound like she’s trying to “guilt” him into lying next to her, where a husband normally lays, beside his wife.

Because she knows that when he’s upset, he diverts a river of negative thoughts and likes to float down his own rapids. 

Lately, he categorizes her asks for them to do things together as “manipulation,” forgetting that was what the vows had been for. It’s a thing she doesn’t understand. Because while she’s no angel, she’s never been cold, never tried to hurt him. She doesn’t understand why more and more he sees her displays of tenderness, even her desire to know about his day, as “controlling” him.

When he had courted her, he’d been impossible to shut up. He’d been so enthusiastic to talk with her, like he’d found a captive audience, that it was cute and laughable. But now all he has for her is cold refusals. 

“I don’t feel like it.”

“I’ve had a long day.” 

“You’ve got your things; I’ve got mine.” 

“Stop trying to manipulate me!”

“I hate it when you try to guilt me into things.”

“Don’t control me.”

For a while, she’d thought it might be trouble at work. That would explain the subtle changes. But pressing had rendered not only a denial, but had further rawed the chafe. His mood had grown so sour finally, without explanation, she’d come to wonder if he was being unfaithful. He would never talk to her, after all. Never give her a reason for increasingly treating her like a stranger and an interloper in his life. Had he tired of her? In her aging, did he find her no longer attractive? Had she unknowingly offended him and not realized there was a wound festering?

But then days would pass and he’d be himself again. Warm, jesting, teasing. Touching. 

So when he picked fights, or the occasional times her own patience broke, she’d reel it in as quickly as she could. 

Acquiesce.

Smooth over. 

Try to soothe. 

He was in some internal struggle, she finally realized, that was about him and not her. So since she was his wife, by both vow and heart, she’d steeled herself to weather the storms when they came, to be there for him, quieter, but still loving.

And anyway, to do the opposite would spark a wildfire that would burn their marriage to char and ash.

“My back hurts.” 

He grips the stolen pillow until his knuckles ache, feels the tug on his conscience for refusing her and lying about why. 

But he is in a bad mood. Dissatisfied with his life. Committed to soak in the mood, feel it like the hurt and pleasure of a pressed bruise. 

He isn’t the man he thought he’d be, where he thought he’d be, or as successful as he thought he should be. And she never seems to see it. She’s always irritatingly content and accepting of their life even though it’s not a shadow of what he’d promised both of them it would be.

He hates that fucking contentment of hers. 

_Because it means she_ _’s okay accepting his failures._ Patronizing is what it is. 

And the _complaining_!

Every time she asks him to do something with her, sit with her, talk with her, go to the store with her… eat at the table every fucking night. Like he’s some monkey she can order to sit next to her, pulling on the reigns of emotional control. ‘Do this, or you don’t love me.’ ‘Be here, or you don’t love me.’ ‘Look at me, or do you want me to think you don’t love me.’ He’s convinced that’s what she’s really thinking, even though she doesn’t say it. No he isn’t convinced, he _knows_ that’s what she thinks. She’s been his wife long enough, and damn anyone, including her, who implies he’s wrong about what goes on in that manipulative head of hers.

Yes, “come to bed” really just means ‘you need to prove you love me.’

Hasn’t he spent a decade working and sweating and providing to prove he fucking loves her?

“I’m sleeping on the couch,” he grunts.

Something in his tone, so cold, makes her stomach clench, her whole body actually, including her groin, but not in the enjoyable way it used to when he would tease her or rollover in bed on top of her.

He is already one step out of the door, the light from the street lamp outside the window lighting his back and throwing stripes across it from the blinds as he enters the darkness of the hallway. 

“Please don’t go. We don’t have to talk.” 

She adds quickly, desperate, swallowing hard, trying to pull him back from whatever tunnel of hate he’s walking down, “It’s just a fight. We’re still okay.”

 _Maybe it_ _’s the truth_ , she hopes.

The pit in her stomach is worsened by a squeezing of her chest, her body’s automatic attempt to quell a surge of fear-based emotions that always come out of her in the form of crying. She knows he never understands her crying. He says she does it to make him feel guilty. And the last time she cried, he only cursed and accused her of manipulating him with her tears. As though crying was a voluntary thing instead of a emotional hemorrhage.

He pauses. Her heart flutters as it’s pulled between the opposing horses of fear and hope. He comes back into the room, standing over the edge of the bed. The streetlight provides enough illumination to see the shadow on his face. He looks drawn, but his eyes burn with a fire she’s never seen. It makes her swallow again, this time in a different sort of fear. Not of physical abuse, he was never that kind of man. But in the last few years, his self-loathing had made passive aggression his tool of choice.

Though he accused _her_ of being passive aggressive. He was careful to maintain his own innocence. One other instance he was never willing to see that he’d chosen to reflect his resentment of the world and of himself onto her.

She doesn’t want to know what he’s going to say, because he’s licked his lips and she knows it’s going to be hurtful.

But when his mouth opens, his voice is caught. He can see her fear because the same streetlight casts a mercury-orange glow on her face. He can see she is pale. That a tear has fallen down her cheek. He hates her tears. She uses them to try and break him. She knows they draw up guilt and make him feel like a bastard and like he should cower his own pride to hers.

But they do break him this time. He can see when she shudders, just the once. The blanket around her is knotted from the inside, a tight knot, and he knows she must be gripping it white-knuckled against her belly. A belly that once carried a baby they were never allowed to know. One that left the cruelty of the world early.

Maybe it _is_ that she wants him there, and not that controlling thing she does. Maye it’s that she’s afraid something is breaking between them. He feels something like that himself. 

His heart softens a bit, melts a bit. He leans against the bed with locked knees, hovering on the decision of whether to give in.

He knows how deep it wounds her when he doesn’t want to lay next to her after a fight. He can see it some of the mornings after, the ones when he doesn’t slip out of the house quickly enough. It’s written in the slack in her shoulders and the heavy shuffle of her feet from a poor night’s sleep. It kills him, and he usually can’t even remember what they’d fought over.

She sniffs, hard.

He leans back on his heels, considering.

Had that been an uncontrollable response? Or had she sensed he was fluctuating, floundering in his resolve to be angry, and seized the moment? 

Another sniff, or more like a choked sob.

It brought him clarity. He knew she _knew_ he hated when she did that. He’d told her. 

It _had_ to be intentional. 

And he knows that if he caves and lays down she’ll roll into him, try to cling to him, suffocate him with her emotions and try to make him feel as though he’d wounded her when he really hasn’t.

She’s just playing that game with him. She’s a master. He’s only realized it in the last two years.

He turns and walks out of the room. She starts to cry, really cry, once he’s half way down the hall to the living room. He hears her call after him, ask him to come back. Hears her claim that this feels different to her.

He thinks to himself, _Let her crocodile tears soak her own fucking pillow tonight, instead of_ my _shirt._

*

She lets go of the blanket, she’d wrapped her fists into it to still them, and yanks her pillow in front of her face to bury her sobs. The emotional belt around her chest is cinched so tight she can’t breathe, and when the sobbing comes her body’s response is to hyperventilate. 

But she rolls onto her belly and smothers herself deeper into the pillow, even though it makes it harder to breathe. Because the sound of those tears can only do harm to whatever between them that feels like it’s breaking tonight. Part of her wants him to hear. Wants his heart to ache to comfort her, to come back and lay beside her and pull her into him and tell her they will be alright tomorrow, or maybe the next day, or even next week, but at some point they will be alright because they are still one person.

But he’s said a dozen times he hates it when she cries. So she tries to quiet them, pushing her face deeper into the bedding until she so cuts off her access to oxygen that her lungs are on fire and stars dance behind her clamped eyelids. She _has_ to breathe, or she’ll pass out. Her ears are already ringing loudly. When she lifts her head to gasp in air, sobs leak out. Once they’re out she can’t stop them, and they wrack her.

They’re not for his benefit. They’re certainly not for hers. They just are.

But she can’t not notice that he doesn’t come to her side.

And after she brings it under control, repeating mantras in her mind to collect herself, she lies awake with the sheets so tangled around her that she feels ensnared. Eventually, the high-pitched whine in her ears dissipates. She can hear her heartbeat, though. It’s loud. She can do nothing but listen as it competes with the only sound in the room, the ticking of the wall clock. 

She waits.

And waits some more.

And eventually the burning blistering her soul stops.

And then cools slowly.

Until by three a.m. it’s simply extinguished.

*

He hears the bedroom door creak from where he’s laying on the couch, but doesn’t move. She’s stopped crying a long time ago. He will apologize tomorrow, like he normally does.

The same street lamp that sometimes keeps him up at night in the bedroom filters in through the living room window. The light is less direct here, but his eyes have been open for hours and have adjusted to the dimness. Their vacation photographs are within his line of sight on one of the walls, along with their wedding portrait. He’s been staring at them for hours, wrestling with why he has been so angry and depressed lately. But he isn’t ready to crawl into bed with her just yet. He’s finally calm and wants to savor that for awhile. Savor it before having to face her pain, which is what he knows will happen if he gets up and goes to her now.

He listens instead.

He can tell she’s closing the door slowly, trying to be quiet. 

That makes his body strain, a bit more attentive. Maybe he _will_ go to her. 

He decides he will.

But he will wait a bit first. Because if he goes now, just because she’s closing the door, it will mean he’s submitting to her indirect attempts at control. But if he _waits_ , it will be a message that he’s going of his own volition.

He hears her push the door the last few inches. But the hinges don’t cooperate, they just groan worse. 

They’ve needed attention for a long time.

She’d asked him once, where the little can of household oil had gone missing to so she could oil them herself. But he’d resented her for pointing out what needed maintenance in the house. That was his job, not hers. So he’d snapped at her, unfairly, and said he’d deal with it.

Only, he realizes he never did.

The door finally shuts with a little, polite _click._

*

She knows he’s still awake on the couch because he hasn’t been snoring. She knows that no matter how quietly she’s just closed the door, he’s had to have heard it. 

She hadn’t wanted to close it. But the claws of abandonment had been digging into her. She’d realized she couldn’t face him if he came back to bed just yet. She hurts too much, and knows she’ll stiffen because of it and won’t be able to receive an embrace without showing reservation. 

And even worse, if he comes to bed and _doesn_ _’t_ try to put his arms around her, she’ll simply break in half.

Her hand hesitates over the knob.

Not to undo the closure. She won’t undo that. She won’t lay her crushed heart bare to him for more torture. Won’t signal how much she really loves him, how much she still _needs_ him even after all these years, since she knows it’ll only result in greater pain if he doesn’t respond.

No, her hand hesitates because she’s deciding whether to lock it.

If she leaves it unlocked, he might come to open the door himself. That would be something.

However unlikely.

But then she finally lets herself admit what she’s been trying not to for awhile. That maybe, this has been on the horizon for sometime. Some leaks can’t be plugged by one person on their own, and she’s been tending the crumbling dam alone for too long. She’s exhausted.

And she admits she can’t handle the roller coaster anymore. She’s spent, once and for all. 

*

He hears the lock click a few minutes after the door has closed.

 _That_ is not something he expects. 

An empty feeling seeps into his gut. For a moment the question of whether this, too, might be an act of some sort runs through his thoughts. But then he dismisses it. He does not believe her capable of that. In fact, he _knows_ that she is more genuine than he give her credit for. What grates on him is that her selfless caring sears his own guilty conscience, so he attacks it just to get her to fight back. If she fights back, he isn’t the only one in the wrong. 

But she’s never left, or even threatened to. He’s convinced she knows it’s his own insecurities that make him act resentful.

But that click scares him.

His feet swing down and onto the floor, and he sits up, listening to hear if she is crying.

He hears nothing, so he pushes to his feet and pads softly down the hall. 

It is too quiet.

That’s why he’d been able to hear the door. And the lock.

He strains to listen. Places his ear carefully to the door, trying not to brush his cheek or the stubble on it against the thin wood frame since the hollow core door would act as an amplifier.

No crying. He thinks she is probably back in bed, but then the floor creaks slightly and he realizes she is still standing behind the door. He doesn’t know why, but this sends the first stabs of actual fear into his lower back. 

He tries the handle.

It’s definitely locked.

He waits, but she doesn’t unlock it, doesn’t move, doesn’t respond at all. If he holds his breath, he can just make our her breathing.

He whispers her name.

When that doesn’t work, he says it again, louder. This time the penitence and concern are completely genuine.

He turns the knob again, harder this time, a bit more desperate.

“Open the door,” he says, trying to sound both calm and firm, nonthreatening but earnest.

*

Her heart races, making her pulse throb in her ears and along her throat. She can even feel it in her armpits, it rages so violently.

His voice pleads to her from the other side of the door.

“Please. Please open the door. I’m sorry. I’ll come to bed.”

Every instinct in her wants her to open, to have his arms wrap around her and to be told she’s still loved and is still the most important thing in his life.

But her ribs hurt, because her muscles camped up badly during the sobs. They’re sore now at every intake and exhale.

And she remembers she’s been here before. A lot this year. 

One too many times.

Because she knows with a sudden certainty, powerful enough to cause gooseflesh, that she won’t survive another time. 

She won’t survive it.

*

He stumbles back, without a point of reference for what’s happening. 

He wonders whether her response means tonight is something different. And he remembers now she’d said that to him while begging him not to leave the room.

He entertains forcing the door, in case something permanent is happening. 

But that might scare her, and he doesn’t want to do that. 

And, anyway, he usually finds the day after an argument that her words of injury have been exaggerated. After all, she’s never worn a shoulder cold enough that he couldn’t melt it with sweet talk or by wrapping his arms around her. She always comes around and thaws in the end without much of a fight. Always continues doing the laundry and the cooking and going to work and putting her paycheck into the joint bank account right next to his. 

He relaxes slightly. At the end of the day, he _knows_ her. 

Knows her better than anyone, he boasts to himself. She is his wife and he is her husband, and she is nothing if not generously forgiving. It’s one of the reasons he’s always loved her. It’s one of her greatest strengths. And she’s forgiven him too many times, after worse arguments than tonight’s, to stop forgiving now.

He considers settling down on the carpet and sleeping against the door so she’ll see in the morning that he’s sorry, that he’s remembered himself. That tonight has just been another outburst of frustration with his life and was really nothing to do with her. She’ll understand in the morning, like she always does. He’ll make them breakfast, spend the day with her, make it up to her.

He’ll oil the hinges on that door.

But after spending half the night tense and coiled with his thoughts, his back really _does_ hurt. It’s not a lie _now_ , and he doesn’t fancy sleeping against a door when he can still sleep on a comfy couch. 

And really, sleeping at the door would just be a gesture, nothing too important. Tomorrow he’ll make plenty of gestures. He’ll make breakfast, and brew coffee, and take her out somewhere. He’ll make up for the mood he’s had. 

He says, “I love you.” 

Because it’s the right thing to say. 

And because those are the words she is continuously hungry for. 

As he heads back to the living room, to the comfort of the couch, he tells himself it’s not a token statement, that he really does mean it, even though he can’t understand why the hell she won’t just accept it without needing to hear it over and over. They’re just words, they’re not actions.

Only, by the time she gets up in the morning, when he’s cooking the eggs and the smell of coffee fills the house, her heart’s finally grown too malnourished to keep an appetite.

She’ll take the truck in to the mechanic herself, and get a ride to the courthouse while she waits for the oil change.


End file.
